When I hold your hand
Saturday, May 14, 2011 at 12:37PM 
We now walk to school, except when it is raining or we happen to be feeling lazy.
After a frantic hour of getting up, getting dressed and getting fed, we say our sweet goodbyes and plod our way up the hill towards the school that is just five minutes away.
The last words before the door slams shut are always the same - 'Mummy, you smell of strawberries!' (don't ask why) - but no sooner have my little girls begun their journey, their attention turns to the walk in hand: the dog that always barks at number 52, the car with painted polar bears at number 34, and the 'secret passage' we recently discovered that cuts through onto the main road which runs past the entrance to the school. They continue to insist that this route should never be revealed to anyone - particularly their older brother, who tends to walk too fast anyway.
My youngest daughter is also the slowest when it comes to walking. If you ask her, she'll explain that this is simply the natural order of things. 'In fact,' she once explained, 'I have the smallest name - just three letters - because I am the smallest in my family.'
To help her along, I offer her my hand.
And this is when I start to think, every day.... every single day.
It's a gift to have these moments in time that are not at all about being anywhere or doing anything, but simply enjoying the 'middle distance', the in-between-ness, and the pleasure of the journey. No to-do lists. No phone calls to make or bills to pay - just time to travel together and smile at the weird and wonderful worlds of our neighbours.
And in holding these still small, sometimes sweaty, hands, I take a moment to think about every one of my children - the hands that are not always next to me and those that are already too old to hold without a significant degree of awkwardness.
That's the tricky part - the sense of loss that never quite goes away.
Somewhere on the horizon of my story, I know that there will come a day when I get myself up, get dressed, get fed, shut the door behind me and walk to work. And how I will miss those sometimes sweaty, sometimes cold, sometimes sticky, often grubby little hands. No more will we stop to stroke neighbour's cat or explore secret paths. It'll simply be a case of going from A to B.
And if the story unfolds in such a way that a noble prince one day asks for my daughter's hand in marriage, I'll only have one thing to say.
Look after it with all the strength you possess. Hold it tightly every day. And always remember to enjoy the journey together, keeping a watchful eye out for secret passages.
Reader Comments (2)
Father’s love is unique and irreplaceable, no matter how tight an other man holds your hand (body or soul) it’s just temporary and conditional, but the father’s love is eternal and unconditional forever, the same as universal god’s love...
And the sense of loss never leaves us from our earliest childhood, it’s the constant feeling-fear of losing our life…